Monthly Archives: October 2009

BitLocker protection on removable drives is known as BitLocker To Go. When a BitLocker-protected removable drive is unlocked on a computer running Windows 7, the drive is automatically recognized and the user is either prompted for credentials to unlock the drive or the drive is unlocked automatically if configured to do so. Computers running Windows XP or Windows Vista do not automatically recognize that the removable drive is BitLocker-protected. With the BitLocker To Go Reader users can unlock the BitLocker-protected drives by using a password or a recovery password (also known as a recovery key) and gain read-only access to their data.

Microsoft wants you to move to Windows 7. An obstacle for moving to Windows 7 is an application that is a necessity for a business or home that might not run under Windows 7 (or Vista). Such legacy applications might not be supported under the current compatibility settings and to make things worse, the company that has developed the application is no longer in business or will not develop an application that is supported by Windows 7. To resolve this problem XPM was developed.

In laymen’s terms XPM allows you to run a Windows XP environment on your Windows 7 system. Technically, you are running a virtualized OS over your Windows 7 host. Virtualization is nothing new, so what’s so special about XPM?

XPM adds the following features to standard virtualization:

USB support – Yes,it’s finally here, USB support inside your virtual environment. You can use your disk on key to save information and more importantly if your legacy application is dependant on some type of USB security plug you are set.

One Click launch – With this feature, the usability experience of applications installed inside the virtual environment becomes seamless. Once the application is installed, you can start it from your host and it will appear as if it running directly on your host.

Installing XPM

Installing XPM is as simple as one,two, three and four…ok,that wasn’t funny, but the installation is a very straightforward process. You navigate to the download page you follow the four steps described there:

Verify that you need XPM– Windows 7 provides ample quantity of compatibility options. Before you install XPM, you should verify whether they solve the issues that you are experiencing they provide a simpler solution to your problems.

Verify that your PC supports XPM – To run XPM, your processor has to support hardware assisted virtualization. To verify that this is the case, you should click the link provided at the second step of the process (or click here) and run the application.The Microsoft® Hardware-Assisted Virtualization Detection Tool will verify whether your processor supports virtualization by providing the following output: If you receive a different output from the application, please review the HAV Detection Tool – User Guide that provide an interpretation of the outputs and provides information on how to rectify the situation (if possible).

Install Virtual PC – This comes in the form of a standard update and will require a restart.

Configure XPM

Once you are done with downloading and installing you should start XPM, by opening the Start menu and writing ’XP Mode’ in the search bar.

When you start XPM for the first time you have to configure it:

Read and accept the license agreement.

The second screen is confusing in my opinion:

Installation folder – XPM uses two virtual hard drives. The first hard drive is the parent VHD which you downloaded in step 4 of the previous section. This VHD contains the basic installation of Windows XP (SP3), and is never changed.The second virtual hard drive is called a differencing virtual disk. The differencing disk contains all the changes that are done to the system (e.g. saved data, newly installed applications,etc.). The differencing disk is always dependent on it’s parent. When you set the path in the installation folder you actually set the location of the differencing disk.

XPMUser – This is the account that will be used to log-on to the virtual Windows XP machine. If you would like to refrain from entering these credential every time you start an application running on XPM make sure to check the ‘Remember credentials (Recommended)’ checkbox.

Updates – As with any OS, you should make sure that XPM is fully updated, unless one of the updates breaks the application you are trying to use.

Shared folders – When installing XPM you provide it access to the host systems folders. This might pose a security threat on your system, and you should make sure that applications installed inside XPM are trusted. On the other hand, in most cases you meant to install these application on your host anyway so the threat isn’t that big. If for some reason you are still worried you will be able to remove the sharing later on.

During the installation a short tutorial is displayed (note the progress bar at the bottom of the page).

Upon completion of the installation, Virtual PC opens with Windows XP (SP3) loaded.

Using XPM

At this stage you are set and you can start using XPM. Note that since this is a virtual system, you should treat it as a standard system. The first thing that struck me odd that this system has no anti-virus software pre-installed. I am assuming that this is due to legal limitations9although this is an open issue for me), so the first thing I did is to install Microsoft Security Essentials on my XPM and then updated it.

The second step (and the reason for this whole adventure) is to install the application that I couldn’t run on Windows 7. For this demonstration I have chosen ‘Word 6 for DOS’ as the problematic application. The following steps are taken to install the application:

Copy the problematic application into the XPM. As you can see from the screenshot below all the drives from my host machine ‘Transylvania7’ are mapped into the XPM.

I start the installation according to the applications basic instructions.

When the installation routine is complete, you can start the application and use it within the XPM.

Up to this point, I haven’t shown you anything that is new. What we have done here, you could have achieved in the past. The major change with XPM is that you can run the application you just installed seamlessly from your Windows 7 desktop.

Log off from the XPM and close it by clicking the red X on the top right of the window. Note that the system is hibernated.

To do this, you need to open the Start menu and enter the name of the application installed within XPM in the search field. We actually installed two applications:

Microsoft Security Essentials

Word 6 for DOS.

The results for Security Essentials are show below:

As you can see , I have this application installed both on my host and inside XPM. The on inside XPM has the suffix of ‘(Windows XP Mode)’. When I choose the XPM Security Essentials, they system is woken from hibernation and a seamless window is opened, showing the application:

Note the XP styled window and the Virtual PC icon on the taskbar. And additional thing to note is that since Security Essentials is a ‘resident’ application, it’s icon from tray inside XPM is also displayed by tray on the host(this became kind of an issue later on).

When you close the application the virtual environment will be hibernated again, please note that all processes communicating with the host have to be closed for the system to be hibernated(hence the issue).

The missing Word 6 for DOS

Security Essentials seems to be working fine, yet once we try to run Word 6 for DOS from the host, it seems to be missing. XPM publishes applications by monitoring the start menu, when it identifies that an application has placed a shortcut on the start menu it will publish it to the host. Word 6 for DOS didn’t create a shortcut for itself on the start menu hence the problem.

In this case, we will create a shortcut for Word 6 inside the XPM and drop it on the Start menu. Once done, we will log off the XPM and turn it off(hibernate it).

Once done, when searching for Word we will see the published shortcut which we can use to start the application:

Advanced Configuration

To be able to access the more advanced settings of XPM, you have to first shut it down (note that until now you have only logged-off and hibernated the system. To shut XPM down use the following steps:

Start XPM.

Choose the Ctrl+Alt+Del option from the menu on top

In the ‘Windows Security’ window choose the ‘Shut Down’ button

Choose ‘Shutdown’ from the drop down list

Once the system has been shut down, open the Start menu and choose ‘Manage Virtual Machines’.

Right click ‘Windows XP Mode’ and choose settings. The first setting enables you to change the name of the VM and add notes to it.

The Memory branch will enable you to change the quantity of RAM used by the VM. Since the XPM uses Windows XP 32bit you can’t use more then 3.7GB.

The Hard Disk 1 branch will display the locations of the hard drives set during setup (parent and differencing). You can change their locations from here.

In addition to that, by using the ‘Modify’ button, you can either merge or compact the differencing VHD. Compacting might be useful since it will shrink the size of the VHD by removing unused space from the file.

The DVD drive branch enables you to configure which DVD is tied into XPM.

Integration features define the relationship between you host system and the XPM. One of those relationships is the mapping of the hard drives from your host into XPM.

Logon credentials enables you to set the account that will be used for the autologon feature and to remove the password from being stored.

Auto publish enables you to control whether the system will automatically publish applications installed within the XPM.

Conclusions

The goal of this post was to scratch the surface of XPM by reviewing it’s usability options. I ended up going a lot deeper then I planned since this is without doubt a complex feature that is based on existing and used technology but with a twist. after I wrote this post I still have several questions that need to answered such as how does XPM treat AV software…Once I installed it everything seemed to be fine but I noticed that I could no longer make XPM go away since it’s real time protection kept the system alive. After removing the AV software the Security Center kept XPM alive since it was warning me that my computer is at risk…Well, I guess I still have to work that one out.

I really love the Snipping Tool. It enables me to take screenshots without having to install third-party software quite efficiently. I did encounter one very annoying issue though when trying to capture context menus or the Start menu- while launching the snipping tool these menus disappeared… 🙁

It seems that there is a solution for this issue. To capture a context menu, open the Snipping Tool, open the menu you would like to capture and then press Ctrl+PrtScn.

The screen should fade and the familiar interface of the snipping tool should appear.

Note that once a screen is captured this will not work again, you will have to reopen the snipping tool.

The Windows 7 product guide is a straightforward document that everyone can use to understand how windows 7 can improve their productivity. This guide is at the user level so it will be tangible by the majority of people.

Personally I found several tips in it, one of them is that by using the following combo you can run an application in Admin mode: Ctrl+Shit+Double left Click on a taskbar item.